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What happens when you cross soccer with geography?

Tag Archives: neighborhood

First weeks are over, classes are running, BBQ is past; it’s time to settle into my first semester. That means planning for next year! Thursday will be a writing circle for all students planning to apply for the major funding grants available from the government, in my case it’s SSHRC (physical geog goes for NSERC) and OGS. Now the actual deadline for these proposals isn’t until late October, but by then I’ll be buried in papers in addition to this, so I need to get moving now.

On the upside, I re-read my full proposal for my application to get into the grad program and it is at least a start for what I could use for my application. Although I’ve recently had some new ideas for where my project might go (patience – I’m doing a slow reveal) the original still works for the basis of a project.

The current proposal is looking at how the local communities around soccer(football) stadia are affected by the gentrification of those stadia. Since the 1990s almost every single stadium in England has been renovated or replaced to comply with safety regulations brought in following the Hillsborough disaster. So with that amount of change over that short a period, I’d like to look at how that has changed not just the socio-economic character of the neighbourhoods, but also how it has affected the club’s relations to it’s neighbours. For instance, does Nick Hornby have to walk farther to get to Emirates Stadium, and how does he feel after all those years at Highbury? My gut is that there is probably some resentment amongst the locals for having to put up with all the construction and then finding out your neighbour jacked up the price of tickets to finance the build (or buyout by debt-ridden Americans – looking at you Glazer). I should know, I currently live next to a construction site where they did a little change in the plans once they broke ground…, but I digress.

One of the things I’ll have to figure out (besides being able to afford a research trip to England) is how to collect the info I’ll need for my thesis. I’m thinking that the socio-economic shouldn’t be too hard to come by, but tapping into the neighbourhood’s emotions will require leg work and interviews. So what will I need to ask, who will I need to ask, and how am I going to be able to do it, these are what I’m going to have to puzzle over before the writing circle.

My other concern is that my proposal engaged with literature, just not the sort of literature that gets valued by scientists. Now this is no slight on Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch is one of my favorite soccer reads, but the people that will be reading my proposal need more than Hornby, Franklin Foer, Simon Kuper, and David Goldblatt, they’ll need the geographers. Now maybe in a decade some grad student will come along with a similar idea and he’ll have Evans to go to as well, but that means I gotta get my butt in gear for the sake of future scholars.